


Spire

by cuneifire (orphan_account)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 19:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19933576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: The nail that held the cross together falls apart in his hands.(Or: Czech and Slovakia, in the beginning)





	Spire

He first comes to know her in glimpses. For the first few years, he thought she was a mirage. Dead, a spirit God had not let be laid to rest. With her wild eyes and windswept hair and sharp, sharp blade, she certainly seemed like a ghost. 

Despite that, Slovakia could never found it in himself to be afraid of Czech. She had a brilliant smile that he always wanted to be nearby, no matter how rare it became with the years. Her clothes were strange but almost familiar and her eyes always glittered when the sun rose and she looked a few years older than him, enough that he had to tilt his chin up to look at her, to smile before she’d smile back and fall into the shadows again. 

He liked her because she didn’t want anything. The Hun boy, the old man with a stern golden pike, the boy with chokingly silver hair and a wide grin and red eyes like the devil, they all wanted something. Land, usually. Little bits and pieces of him gone by the wayside. They whispered when he turned his head the wrong way, words that made him think of glittering broken pieces of glass shattered everywhere, made him curl his fists and pull out the metal tools, the ones the girl had passed him, hilt first, not touching his fingers nor wrist nor hand. 

One day, he asked her if she was a ghost. 

She’d smiled, taken a step towards him. It had only been then that he’d realized she wasn’t much taller than him; she was nine to his seven, all those years he’d thought she was all grown up. But she was still so weary, tense lines around her eyes and rough scabs on her lips and forearms. 

“No,” she’d said, slow and mythical, enough that he wanted to lean in, touch her, see if she was real. But he’d been told not to touch spirits.

She shook her head. His neck hurt from craning to look up at her. “No, I’m not a ghost. Though sometimes…” She shook her head, smiled. He thought she looked tired. 

“Here,” She said, pulling a glinting cross off of her neck. It was an old thing- a gleaming piece of metal hammered together by a single nail. “Ghosts do not worship, do they?”

He eyed her curiously. “I didn’t know you wore-” he points. “-those.” He’d seen some of the men who wore necklaces like that, tall and glowing in robes. He didn’t think she would be one of them. She always had dirt under her nails and a hard expression on her face. 

She shook her head, shoulders drooping. “I do what I must to survive,” She tells him. “And you should too.” And then she’d stepped forwards, strung the loosely tied bit of lace over his neck. Her fingers brushed near his throat, warm and calloused. 

She smiled at him, eyes weary. “Take care,” She said, and he felt sadness drop in his chest. 

She leaned closer, whispered a handful of words into his ear.

And then she left.

.

He doesn't see her for a long, long time. Gradually, he forgets the details- the precise crinkle of the skin near her eyes, the shade of her lashes, the way she wore her hair. Then the bigger picture starts to get fuzzy around the edges- he can’t remember what her hair colour was, the shade of her eyes, whether her boots were leather or metal tipped. 

But he never forgets how she felt warm, how her nails always had grime under then. He never forgets her, never completely, because his neck was constantly circled in a reminder. 

He passes by those men again, once. They look at him for a long hard time, his figure reflexively around the cross, draped in skinny stitched cloth. He tilts his head, curls his fingers reflexively around the cross at his neck. The men eye him for a long time, and then leave him be, walk off with their heads held high. 

With a quiet exhale of a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding, he'd passed a silent thanks to both his gods and the girl.

Thinking of her, he clutches the cross closer.

.

The next time he sees the Hun boy, he has a name. The boy says it’s not Hungary, that he's called  _ Magyarorszag.  _ But Slovakia hadn't heard what he'd had to say over the sliding blade placed against his throat. 

And apparently asking for miracle twice was too many, because the boy did not falter upon the sigh of his cross. If anything, the little grin on his face got a tad bigger. 

He'd tugged Slovakia's wrist so hard he'd almost fell face-first into the ground, nothing gentle about the way the boy held a sword. 

“Your name is Elek now.” Were the only words that the other boy said to him on the way back. He must've gotten tired of holding the blade, but never once had he let it go, let his grip slacken even the slightest bit. 

Slovakia- or Elek, as Hungary would later drill into him- didn't know what was going to happen. He'd heard of people  _ like him  _ dying- Old man Rome sitting in his eternal tomb somewhere- but he didn't know when, or how it happened.

His hands shook as he stepped into the foreign palace, and it occurred to him he'd had a knife strapped to his boot all this time.

.

It's decades, maybe centuries, of repeating that same routine; running after any chores Hungary deems appropriate for him, trying to run his land and being told he fails miserably, trying to speak Hungary's language without coming off as a complete foreigner, running through the scrolls of scribes, trying to understand what's passing outside the castle, the territory, the kingdom. He runs through chores so fast he collapses on a slab of vaguely bedlike wood every night, completely exhausted. 

Hungary never explicitly tells him, but it's pretty clear that however their type dies, she expects him to kick that bucket pretty soon. He never does. 

It goes like this for what feels for forever. 

Until one day, Hungary walks up to him, pushes a piece of paper into his hand roughly and delivers a few curt words. 

“This is happening in your assigned territory. Assess the threat, report back and tell if they are a threat worth fighting, any sort of danger to our current stability.” Then she nods, walks away. 

Apparently he's trustworthy now. 

He looks down at the papers scrawled in his hands. He's barely literate, a few broken basic words of Hungarian, but he understands. 

He understands that he is to head to Prague, a vastly sprawling city he has seen in nothing but his dreams. He understands there is a threat- a rash of a religious movement dead set against the Church. He is to take note of whether they are worth fighting. 

For reasons unknown his heart keeps stuttering in his chest, pounding against his ribcage. He hitches a ride to Prague with the crown's money and buys another knife with his own.

Stepping up to the edges of the city, his eyes go wide and his jaw drops. It's the stuff of legends, glittering rooftops and shined cobblestone roads, men in shiny army marching quick pace down the road. 

Reflexively, his hand goes to his neck. He rips the cross off its string, lets it loose in his hand. Stares at it for a long, hard second. He should throw it away. In a city like this, better to let them guess your faith than be found out and hung. 

But his fingers clenched around it, and he threw the two pathetic pieces of nailed together metal in his pocket instead. 

He closes his eyes and lets the wind whistle in his ears, sees shattered pieces of ghosts in his mind's eye.

_ “Ales,”  _ the girl from so many years ago says, the one whose eyes and lips and hair he'd forgotten but whose voice he'd recognize anywhere, even the grave he's sure she's in by now. 

He opens his eyes, a tint of a grin on his face. Something tells him she'd have liked this. 

He starts walking, chest filled to the brim with some emotion he can't place.


End file.
